Gitmo m/m 36”x72” 2006
Innocente m/m 48”x60” 2006
Reasonably Passionate? m/m 72”x48” 2006
"Reasonably Passionate?" m/m 72”x48”
Reasonably Passionate? (fragment) m/m 72”x48”
"El Mero Epilogue" 12 min 32 sec | video
Metropolitano m/m 36”x60” 2006
Scrambled Pistols with Eggs m/m 36”x24” 2006
Stand – off m/m 36”x24” 2006
Kanadiense Sunrise m/m 36”x60” 2006
Metropolitano m/m 36”x60” 2006
Scrambled Pistols with Eggs m/m 36”x24” 2006
Stand – off m/m 36”x24” 2006
Kanadiense Sunrise m/m 36”x60” 2006
B1 m/m 24”x12” 2006
A4 m/m 24”x12” 2006
Yamato m/m 24”x12” 2006
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Guns, Girls, and Galaxies: The Landscape Paintings of Raffael Antonio
Iglesias.
by Ullysses Castallanos
When I was young, before the dawn of Nintendo and Playstation, I used
to love going to the game arcades and playing the pinball machines.
Each pinball machine has a theme. Some are themed after T.V. shows,
others, after rock bands, or movies, or cartoons. I was always fascinated
by the way in which the pinball machines work: A small shiny ball is
propelled by flippers on an inclined glass-enclosed table and bounces
about, guided by magnets, tripping contacts and hitting targets, as
bright lights and strobes shine and bells ding in a barrage of visual
and aural stimuli. At the far end of the table is a vertical panel that
shows the score in rolling analog numbers, and this panel lights up
as well. The panel and the table work in tandem to create the effect
of depth, so that the player feels wrapped in the world of the machine.
The pinball table is designed to create a sensory overload in order
to confuse the player.
The paintings of Raffael Iglesias work in a similar fashion. They are
essentially Baroque landscapes, but are traversed by galaxies, spaceships,
appropriated images from mass culture, and bling bling elements in a
contrapuntal arrangement of syncopated vortexes, diagonals and receding
spatial effects that draw the viewers attention into the center image,
usually consisting of girls from Victoria’s Secrets catalogues,
gun turrets from battleships, characters from Japanese monster movies
or fighting machines from Star Wars that have been crudely silkscreened
onto the canvas. The crudeness of the silkscreened images contrasts
with the delicate technique used to render the rest of the painting.
Hundreds of elements collide on the picture plane. There are pictures
within pictures within pictures. Upon close inspection one can discern
little stickers and cutouts from product packaging buried within hundreds
of layers of acrylic gel, but as the viewer moves away from the picture,
all these elements become a coherent composition, a landscape in the traditional
sense. The landscape, however, is part of a greater whole: There is a
composition within a composition. A Matryoshka consisting of a landscape
nestled within a scene that could have been plucked from a science fiction
movie or from the cover of a pulp fiction magazine.
The paintings contain bits of text as well. These allude to the overall
narrative of each piece and act like the buffers in the pinball game or
the text indicator guides of a video game. Iglesias also believes it to
be analogous to the “ticker” text that scrolls at the bottom
of the TV screen on CNN programs. Like the chorus in an ancient Greek
drama, these bits of text push forth the narrative in each of the paintings,
but they are meant to merely point to facts, just like the “lives
left” indicator or the zero strength left in a video game’s
character. The text is merely a blip on the canvas, a simple fact that
is open to our interpretation.
In doing so, Iglesias hopes that the viewer’s own experiences
will “activate” the meaning in the painting. In a sense, Iglesias’
paintings are meant to be played with just like a video game. It is our
individual experiences and prejudices that provide the ultimate interpretation.
Iglesias, who admits he loves watching television, has an afinity for
combatative sport. And this obsession has translated into his new works
in video. For instance, his video entitled “El Movie Episode 2”
is a paean to the bloody art of wrestling. it consists of a series of
images culled from films and wrestling matches, and a number of stereotypically
Latin American shots of Cheech and Chong and illegal Aliens intermingled
with images from films such as taxi driver, Men in Black, Spiderman cartoons
and pornography. The images fade in and out of the frame like a slide
show of family photos, with the occasional plumes of smoke adding a touch
of mystery. The video has a soundtrack, for example during the “Intermezzo”;
an “entr’acte” consisting of footage of WWF’s
head honcho Vince MacMahon montaged with images from bloody wrestling
matches and violent caged fights accompanied by a whimsical soundtrack.
The Intermezzo functions as a transitional device, as in the switch from
black and white to color and back to black and white in the film Kafka.
The intermezzo alludes to the epic nature of pro wrestling, and to its
pomp and circumstance, hearkening back to epic films like “Patton”,
“Ben Hur” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”, which contained
an entr’acte at their mid points. Wrestlers kill each other slowly
for our enjoyment. Their bloody faces look at the crowd, their numbed-out
lips curved into a toothless grin, and the mob responds with thunderous
applause.
The intermingling of the brutally real and the humorous fakeness of
contemporary life is a running theme in Iglesias’ work. He has said
that “I like to watch CNN, old Star Trek episodes and wrestling
‘pay per views’ while I work. In fact the composition of CNN's
on screen look was a big influence of the overall look of my recent work”.
In this sense, Iglesias becomes a cathode ray to the cathode ray. Distilling
the myriad bytes of information that he sees daily on television through
the lens of his subconscious mind and back again onto the canvas. Raffael
Iglesias aims to be a channeler for the mass media that surrounds him.
His work deals with much more than the pervasiveness of mass media, however.
His new paintings are grounded in an obsession for reinterpreting art
history. Iglesias “remixes” the works of artists like Cy Twombly
(?), Emily Carr and Jackson Pollock, in the same way that a DJ/producer
will remix a preexisting track. In some of his new works, he reinterprets
works by Canadian artists and challenges the art world’s take on
Canadiana, while simultaneously challenging the idea of the exotic other
within the spectrum of a social/ political dialogue.
The work of Raffael Iglesias is baroque in its excessiveness, but there
is nothing out of balance or out of place. Although the use of stickers
in his paintings seems whimsical on the surface, Iglesias asserts that
he will often spend hours trying to determine exactly where a sticker
should go.
His influences are as multiple as the elements in his work, derived from
a myriad of different media translated into a marriage wherein the Baroque
meets playstation. The shiny surfaces and bold use of color are reminiscent
of all the impedimenta that accompany a wrestling match. The pyrotechnics,
the bright lights, the loud, brash musical themes that accompany the wrestlers
as they climb onto the ring, the scantily-clad female wrestlers and sidekicks,
all of these elements are transposed and reinterpreted within a two dimensional
plane. Wrestling is a caricature of our daily struggle to survive, to
be something, to leave a mark, or simply the heroism of making it to another
day. And it is also a form of entertainment, a means to escape the drabness
of daily existence. But is wrestling really that far removed from reality?
Raffael Iglesias views this lowbrow form of entertainment as viable gage
for where the culture is going. To quote Robert Deniro: “It’s
not a war….it’s a pageant”
Ullysses Castallanos
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